Weekend Box Office: Twilight Bites Big at Box Office

Well, at least these two kids weren’t shut up in a dark movie theater all weekend. 

Again, we all knew Twilight was going to be number one. And as my partner in blog crime Dave wrote, the teen vampire love film made an impressive $35.7 million on its first day alone (with a considerable chunk of that coming from midnight screenings…hey, wasn’t that a school night…?). Now, according to Variety, it looks like its weekend total will be about $70.6 million (final totals later on Monday, of course), much better than the studio’s prediction of $50-60 million. Unsurprisingly, the audience was 75% female; maybe more surprisingly, a solid 45% was over age 25. Twilight moms, indeed.

The real question now is how will this stand up in the weeks to come? The solid teen girl audience defied the usual Hollywood maxim that movies aimed at that group can’t open big. Now, though, will they give Twilight the kind of repeat business that turned Titanic into a worldwide phenomena a decade ago? To be honest, I’m much more interested in seeing how next week’s numbers turn out than this one.

Second place was a fight between the animated family film Bolt and the not so family film Quantum of Solace, last week’s box office winner. Right now they’re in a virtual tie, with respectively $27 million and $27.4 million. Final numbers tomorrow may make things a little clearer.

That’s undeniably a low opening for Bolt, but Disney acknowledges that the film got caught up in Twilight mania; they’re hoping that the long Thanksgiving weekend will create a need for a family film and give it another set of downs. Quantum showed a 59% drop from its US opening last week, but with $418 worldwide already in the bank, the producers are probably just rolling around naked in large piles of international currency anyway.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa was in fourth place with $16 million (wow, it feels like that was released about five hundred years ago). Role Models came in fifth with $7.2 million. The comedy has been performing steadily since its release.

So next weekend, with the long Thanksgiving break, offers lots of intrigue–how will Twilight hold up? Will Bolt recover? Can Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon provide enough name recognition to give Four Christmases a solid start? Who’s excited about Transporter 3? Stay tuned.